Corrugated plastic leaching chambers receive and disperse wastewater when buried within soil and other media. They have been described in various U.S. patents, including U.S. Pat. No. 4,759,661, No. 5,336,017, and No. 5,511,903, all of Nichols et al. and have been widely sold as Infiltrator® chambers. The prior art Infiltrator chambers and chambers from competitors generally have arch shape cross sections with opposing side perforated planar sidewalls running up to the chamber top from bases having flanges to support the chamber on the media within which it is buried.
Recently, improved chambers have been introduced and sold commercially as Infiltrator® Quick4™ chambers. An exemplary chamber is illustrated by FIG. 1 herein. The chambers are described in co-pending U.S. patent applications including Ser. No. 10/677,938 “Corrugated Leaching Chamber” of Brochu et al. and Ser. No. 10/677,772 “Leaching Chamber with Inward Flaring Sidewall Perforations” of Swistak et al. As reference to the products or patent applications will show, the new chambers have various innovative features which include a base flange with a lengthwise fin at the outer edge, along with sidewall slots extending down to the just above the base flange. The chambers are also free of lengthwise or transverse ribs and nest particularly well.
In typical use, the Quick4 chamber is fully surrounded by soil. Wastewater introduced into the chamber interior percolates into the soil at the slot openings. Generally, water discharged from the chamber sidewall flows downwardly to the water table or another discharge point beneath the chamber. However, the micro-physics of how the water moves through the soil in such situations is presently in good measure informed speculation. In part, what happens depends on the character of the soil or other media. In part, the designer of chambers has to respond to the beliefs of sanitary system regulators. The present invention addresses a reasonable hypothesis about how water flows, to give assurance that wastewater percolating into the soil from the chamber is effectively carried away.